Many marketers don’t think about landing pages until late in the campaign creation process—and that can hurt their conversion rates.
“They shouldn’t be an afterthought,” said Anna Talerico, executive vice president at ion interactive inc., noting that the landing page is one place marketers need to be especially creative and not miss the opportunity to pitch to the prospect.
SurePayroll, a SaaS provider of payroll services, works with ion to create unique landing pages for all of its campaigns.
“Don’t be afraid to fail,” said Scott Brandt, vice president of marketing at SurePayroll. “Test everything—just not during your busiest season.”
Brandt and Talerico spoke during a session at the MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum in Boston on Tuesday.
Marketers should study best practices, and leverage their own existing content, videos, promotions and graphics to make their landing pages as enticing as possible to prospects, said Brandt. “And measure everything through the sale, not the lead.”
For SurePayroll, the landing page development strategy is to first test radically different concepts—Brandt called it the “innovation” stage. Then, once what works best is determined, they move on to “iterative” testing, looking at specifics like headlines, buttons, offers and copy. “You don’t want to sit down every time and create an entirely new landing page.”
In the past, SurePayroll used text-heavy landing pages with minimum graphics. Through tests, they have reduced the amount of text and tried a variety of graphic styles. Some tests were too text-light, said Brandt, and that’s a mistake, because you need the prospect enough information so they’ll keep moving along in the pre-sales process.
It’s important to segment your users and prospects when creating landing pages, so you craft the right kind of page for the right target audience, said Talerico. And make sure you give them enough information to direct them where you want them to go—without overwhelming them with a home page’s worth of information.
“The landing page isn’t the place to pack in everything,” she said, noting that too much data will get them out of the right mindset. “You want to keep them in their clickflow.”
